Hospitals, diagnostic centers and medical imaging centers may use multiple types of equipment. A diverse collection of imaging or scanning devices may be used to provide services to patients and/or assist in diagnosis. A single hospital may, for example, provide x-ray examinations, computed tomography (CT) imaging, ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, and interventional radiology among other procedures or imaging techniques. Each procedure may involve one or multiple machines, one or more imaging devices, and one or more workflows.
In order to gain insights in to how well a hospital is running its business, performing procedures, or operating its devices, business intelligence applications may be used to evaluate clinical workflows and the hospital environment. The challenge for business intelligence applications is to identify data that is relevant to the analysis. The complexity of a hospital environment, including the multiple types of devices and data, constant changes in the data and layout, variance in data storage location, and relationships between the data and the hospital, makes the identification of relevant data difficult. Business intelligence applications may be unable to negotiate with data sources in the hospital to acquire relevant data. Furthermore, even when connections from business intelligence applications to relevant data have been previously established, updates of the relevant aspects (organizational structures, device specifics, medical considerations and planning details) may hamper the ability of the applications to access relevant data.